What HealthIT Leaders are saying about portals
Last week I attended the CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) Fall Forum, and was surprised to find my biggest take-away to be about something I hadn’t thought much on in awhile: patient portals. I have always been an advocate of portals, supporting the “meaningful use” criteria that promoted their use when I was on the HIT Standards Committee (2009-2011) as well as when I worked at the ONC (2012-2014). And, whenever I present on the topic of Patient/Consumer Engagement, I always include information about the power of patient access to their own data to empower them to participate as partners in their health and healthcare. However, I had not stepped back and thought about how ubiquitous portal use had actually become, nor identified how much a routine part of healthcare that portals had grown to be. This is what became glaringly apparent to me during CHIME.
It’s not because there were numerous presentations about portals at the meeting. Actually, quite the opposite. Portals were simply talked about in the presentations and networking conversations as if they had always been around. Like EHRs, folks were talking about how they were enhancing their portals, streamlining their navigation, and decreasing the time before results are released - but not about if or when they were implementing them. The health IT leaders at CHIME were also talking about tracking and measuring the digital experience of patients using their portals - and what that tells them about the quality of the site, as well as what it tells them about the individuals using the site. There was discussion about the “stage 3 meaningful use” and MACRA performance criteria, where portals are not only a method for patients to access data about themselves, but also a way to contribute and share their own “patient-generated” data with their providers. Using mobile to access the portal data and display it on a mobile device was also a theme of conversation.
Lastly, and probably the most exciting discussion was related to the release of clinical notes via the patient portal. Joining the “Open Notes” national initiative (www.opennotes.org), quite a number of healthcare organizations’ IT leaders described taking their portals to the next level by adding access to all types of clinical notes (progress notes, visit notes, surgical reports, discharge summaries, etc). Since this six year old initiative has well-documented positive outcomes for both patients and healthcare organizations, increased diffusion of access to clinical notes data is sure to further boost the benefits seen from the use of portals. All of this to say … patient portals have come of age … and I am excited about where we are going!
